Gravina in Puglia

The ravine is the first thing that disorients you about Gravina. The old town runs right up to the lip of a limestone gorge, houses stacked to the very edge, and a single bridge — the Ponte Acquedotto, arches rising directly out of the ravine floor — carries you across to a viewpoint where the whole settlement reveals itself: cave dwellings cut into the opposite cliff face, a church built partly inside the rock, centuries of habitation layered into a landscape that looks, from certain angles, more like a film set for a biblical epic than a functioning Italian town. I mentioned this to a local guide and he told me, without much surprise, that a production crew had in fact shot scenes here for exactly that reason a few years back.

Gravina’s bread carries its own DOP-adjacent reputation, close cousin to Altamura’s more famous loaf and, according to more than one baker here, made with a stricter adherence to the old durum wheat and sourdough method than some of what now gets sold under Altamura’s name. We bought a loaf from a forno near Piazza Notar Domenico that still fires an oven built into the rock, the crust nearly black and the crumb a pale yellow from the local grano duro, and ate it that evening with a bottle of the region’s Gravina DOC white wine, made mostly from Greco and Malvasia grapes grown on the tufo soil around the ravine.

What makes Gravina distinct from the region’s other cave towns is how much of the old settlement is still inhabited rather than preserved as a museum piece. We walked down into the Civita quarter on the ravine’s edge, past cave dwellings some families occupied until well into the twentieth century, a few still holding wine cellars carved into the rock that are used to this day, kept naturally cool through the summer without any need for refrigeration. One cellar owner let us in to taste a Gravina bianco straight from the barrel, the temperature noticeably cooler than the air outside despite the midday heat.

Lia kept comparing it to Matera, just over the regional border in Basilicata and far more famous for the same kind of cave architecture, and I understood the comparison but thought it undersold Gravina slightly — this town has kept a working, unpolished relationship with its own rock-cut history that Matera, now firmly on the tourist circuit, has largely lost.

When to go: Spring and autumn suit the ravine walks and the old town best. The Ponte Acquedotto viewpoint is most dramatic in the late afternoon, when the light angles into the gorge and picks out the cave openings on the far cliff.